Photos Show Walmart Apparel at Site of Deadly Factory Fire in Bangladesh

Source: The Nation

Josh Eidelson

NGOs are slamming Walmart following a Saturday fire that killed at least 112 workers at a Bangladesh factory supplying apparel to the retail giant. While Walmart says it has not confirmed that it has any relationship to the factory, photos provided to The Nation show piles of clothes made for one of its exclusive brands.

In a statement e-mailed Sunday night, Walmart expressed sympathy for the victims’ families, and said that it was “trying to determine if the factory has a current relationship with Walmart or one of our suppliers…” The company called fire safety “a critically important area of Walmart’s factory audit program,” and said that it has been “working across the apparel industry to improve fire safety education and training in Bangladesh.” Walmart added that it has “partnered with several independent organizations to develop and roll out fire safety training tools for factory management and workers.”

But in a Monday interview, Workers Rights Consortium Executive Director Scott Nova said Walmart’s “culpability is enormous. First of all they are the largest buyer from Bangladesh” and so “they make the market.” Nova said Bangladesh has become the world’s second-largest apparel supplier "because they’ve given Walmart and its competitors what they want, which is the cheapest possible labor costs.”

“So Walmart is supporting, is incentivizing, an industry strategy in Bangladesh: extreme low wages, non-existent regulation, brutal suppression of any attempt by workers to act collectively to improve wages and conditions,” Nova told The Nation. “This factory is a product of that strategy that Walmart invites, supports, and perpetuates.” The WRC is a labor monitoring group whose board is composed of students, labor organizations, and university administrators.

12. I quit buying Levi's a few years ago...

... the fabric is flimsy, not like the real 501's or 505's that would last you for years, if not a decade (I have a few pair that are at least that old) and still hold together and look good. Also, noticed no "Made in USA" anywhere on the articles. The best deal is to spend a half hour checking out the thrift shops, scads of good, solid denim jeans, just have to look to find them in your size.

6. Intensified echoes of Tom Delay and the Marianna Islands. nt

7. Not just Wal Mart. They were jobbers for a lot of big retail

companies worldwide, including Kohl's and Penney's.

If you want to avoid supporting sweatshop labor, you can't even make your own clothing these days, the US no longer makes fabric and retail fabric stores are full of really sleazy stuff made for quilters and other hobbyists.

Maybe this will finally shock Bangladesh into making a few workplace rules about unblocked, unlocked fire exits.

It turns out that a sweatshop in Bangladesh that made clothes for The Gap, Abercrombie & Fitch, JC Penney, Target, and others, suffered an eerily Triangle-like disaster just a few months ago:

When we noted the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire on March 25, you might have looked at that and thought, phew, good thing stuff like that isn’t happening anymore. But in developing countries around the world with little to no worker rights and sweatshops paying pennies a day, it is. Like in Bangladesh in December 2010 when 29 workers died after a fire swept through the Hameem garment factory. The workers were trapped inside because guards had been ordered to lock the gates in the event of a fire in order to prevent clothes from being stolen during the confusion. The factory made clothes for GAP.
Consumerist links a video interview of Charles Kernaghan, director of the Institute for Global Labor and Human Rights, who notes the parallels to Triangle, including the locked exits, low wages, and workers leaping to their deaths:

This is going on still in the global economy today. Not one change…

The workers work twelve to fourteen hours a day, seven days a week. They get one day off a month. And they live in abject misery, in miserable hovels that are unimaginable. Bangladesh is now the third-largest exporter in the world of garments to the United States.
http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/a_triangle_shirtwaist-like_dis.php

18. Really,

19. This is just sickening

I just finished writing a paper on the Bhopal disaster. My mentor (professor) is from India and teaches in California. My paper compared the Bhopal disaster in 1984 with the BP disaster in 2010 and the differences in which they were handled by the company.

The fire in Bangladesh is going to be the next big case study on how a company screws their employees. I don't have much hope that anything will be done to help these people, certainly not from their corporate overloards

20. There is only one way to stop this exploitation of worker, both domestic and foreign.

The growth of the industrial base of this nation during the period up to the Civil can be attributed to tariffs. It was the sole source of income for the federal government and remained the major source until the 1940's. The founding fathers grasp the simple concept that it was the only way that the nation could obtain economic independence. That is to be self sustaining and a exporter of finished good rather than an exporter of raw resources and and importer of finished goods.

This is what has transpired during the last fifty years as corporations have gained control of Congress and have been rewarded with policies that have decimated our industrial base. One of the key components in this war against the working class has been the destruction of unions which left the working class with little or no support in Congress to protect their interest. The sad fact of the matter is that the workers have brought this on their own-selves. Throughout the South, for example, the working class bought into the so-called Right-to-Work laws that eventually destroyed the textile industry resulting the massive loss of jobs. Perhaps the workers will wakeup before the nation becomes little more than a massive service industry of low paying jobs with no future and as desperate as the foreign workers that are being exploited.